In the late nineteenth century, a Tibetan family set out on pilgrimage to Khawakarpo, one of the most sacred mountains in the Tibetan world. They were poor, grieving, and apparently had no intention of abandoning the religion into which they had been born. By the time their journey was over, however, one of the family’s sons was on a path that would make him an extraordinary figure in Tibetan religious history.
His name was Télesphore Hiong. In 1891, he became what Catholic missionary records describe as the first Tibetan Catholic priest.[1] His largely forgotten story disproves the familiar Western image of Tibet as an almost uniformly Buddhist civilization. Long before the Chinese Communist takeover, small Christian communities existed along Tibet’s eastern frontier, and their relationship with the dominant Buddhist institutions around them was sometimes peaceful and sometimes violently hostile. Hiong belonged to that little-known world.
The most detailed surviving Catholic account places the beginning of Hiong’s story around 1860 in Derge, in the eastern Tibetan region of Kham. His parents were reportedly relatively prosperous pastoralists until bandits attacked the family, killed his father, and stole their livestock. His mother was left alone with six children. Deprived of the animals on which their livelihood depended, the family fell into poverty and became beggars.[2]
Eventually, Hiong’s mother set out with her children on pilgrimage to Khawakarpo, the great snow mountain on the Tibetan-Yunnan frontier that has long been regarded as sacred. It was a journey firmly situated within the Tibetan religious world, yet according to the missionary account, the event that redirected the family’s spiritual trajectory did not occur at the sacred mountain. It happened unexpectedly along the way.
While passing through Yerkalo, one of the children was badly bitten by a dog and was taken to a Catholic missionary for treatment. The injury forced the family to remain there. During this prolonged stop, the Catholic account says, the pilgrims encountered Christianity, studied the religion, and eventually converted. At baptism, one of the sons received the Christian name Télesphore and would eventually become Tibet’s first indigenous Catholic priest.[3]
The missionaries apparently recognized unusual ability in the young Télesphore. According to his Catholic biography, he attracted attention for his intelligence and religious devotion and was sent first to Tatsienlu, today’s Kangding, and then to the minor seminary at Mouping. In 1891 he was ordained a priest.[4]
This was significant for a Catholic mission that remained heavily dependent upon European clergy. An indigenous Tibetan priest could speak to Tibetan communities from a cultural position that French missionaries could never fully occupy. Hiong was therefore more than a symbolic convert. After his ordination, he was given responsibility for teaching Latin to a small group of students who accompanied him as he moved among mission stations at Chapa, Mosimien, and Tatsienlu.[5] His work formed part of the larger Catholic attempt to establish a native clergy in the Tibetan borderlands.
European missionaries had spent decades attempting to establish Christianity in Tibetan regions. And now they had a native Tibetan priest in Hiong, traveling among Tibetan communities. In 1906, Bishop Pierre-Philippe Giraudeau sent him to investigate the possibilities for missionary work in the regions of Taofu, Rongmé Tchangcu, and Mowkung. The following year, Hiong and a French priest, Father Charrier, were assigned to evangelize the Taofu region.[6]
Hiong’s story also belongs to the history of Yerkalo, one of the most unusual Christian communities in the Tibetan borderlands. The community grew out of an earlier Catholic settlement at Bonga. According to the mission’s own history, that settlement was destroyed in 1865 after years of conflict and persecution. Some of the displaced Christians eventually settled along the Mekong, where missionaries purchased land and established the Yerkalo mission around 1867. The founding group was not ethnically uniform. The mission history specifically notes that it included several Chinese Christians.[7]
Yerkalo’s existence was precarious. The mission history records repeated destruction, expulsions, and conflicts during the nineteenth century. French diplomatic intervention sometimes helped missionaries return to their posts, an important reminder that the Catholic missions themselves did not exist outside the political struggles of the period. European missionaries operated within a world in which religious expansion, diplomatic pressure, Chinese authority, Tibetan political power, and monastic interests could become entangled.[8]
The violence became particularly severe in 1905. According to the Yerkalo mission history, four missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society and eleven Christians from Yerkalo were massacred by emissaries of the lamas, while the residence and chapel were burned.[9] The episode forms part of a documented period of anti-Christian violence in the Tibetan borderlands.
This history sits uneasily beside the version of Tibet that later became dominant in much of the Western imagination. Tibet came to be represented through images of remote monasteries, meditation, compassion, peaceful monks, and timeless spiritual wisdom. Those elements are real, but they can obscure another historical reality: Tibetan Buddhist institutions existed within powerful political and social systems, possessed material interests, and often came into violent conflict with religious competitors.
The very existence of communities such as Yerkalo challenges the tendency to treat Tibetan identity and Tibetan Buddhism as interchangeable. Some Tibetans converted to Christianity and still identified as culturally Tibetan. Télesphore Hiong embodied that uncomfortable fact more dramatically than almost anyone. He spent much of his life helping a foreign-born religion establish itself among his own people.
Hiong’s Tibetan identity did not protect him when political turmoil engulfed the region. During the upheavals surrounding the fall of China’s Qing dynasty, his Catholic biography reports that he was detained at Louho, placed in chains, and threatened with death by Tibetan rebels. Chinese troops eventually freed him, after which he returned to Tatsienlu and directed the school for catechists until 1920.[10]
Hiong continued serving the Catholic mission for decades. By 1930, when he was around seventy, he retired to Mosimien and later returned to Tatsienlu. He died there on February 6, 1945, reportedly at the age of eighty-five.[11] More than half a century had passed since his ordination.
Today Télesphore Hiong is virtually unknown outside the archival history of Catholic missions in Tibet. That obscurity is telling because Western accounts of Tibetan history have often been organized around competing political narratives. One depicts old Tibet primarily as a spiritual Buddhist civilization later devastated by Chinese Communist occupation. The Chinese state, by contrast, has long emphasized oppression and backwardness under the old Tibetan system. Both frameworks can flatten people whose lives do not fit comfortably within them.
Tibetan Christians are among those people. Their existence raises questions rarely encountered in popular accounts of Tibet. What happened when Tibetans rejected Buddhism? How freely could they practice another religion? To what extent were conflicts involving Christian converts driven by religion, and to what extent were they connected to the political involvement of European missionaries and Chinese or Tibetan authorities?
Perhaps the most memorable aspect of Hiong’s story is its beginning. Had the dog not attacked one of the children on the pilgrimage, perhaps the family would have reached the sacred mountain, Khawakarpo, and Télesphore Hiong would have disappeared into the vast anonymity of nineteenth-century Tibetan history. Perhaps he would have become a Tibetan Buddhist monk. Instead, an accident redirected his entire life and three decades later, he was a Catholic priest.
His story deserves to be shared because it belongs to Tibet too. It reveals a Tibetan religious world more contested and internally varied than the idealized version that later captivated many Westerners. Hiong does not fit comfortably into the familiar picture of Tibet, and that is precisely what makes him worth remembering.
Footnotes
[1] Mission Thibet, “P. Télesphore Hiong,” which identifies Hiong as the first Tibetan priest and dates his ordination to 1891. Mission Thibet: P. Télesphore Hiong. See also IRFA: Tibet Mission Report, 1892.
[2] Ibid. The account states that Hiong was born in Derge around 1860 and that after his father was killed and the family’s livestock stolen, his mother was left with six children.
[3] Ibid. The account describes the family’s pilgrimage to Khawakarpo, the dog bite at Yerkalo, their encounter with a Catholic missionary, and their subsequent conversion.
[4] Ibid. The biography describes Hiong’s education at Tatsienlu and Mouping and dates his ordination to 1891.
[5] Ibid. Following ordination, Hiong taught Latin to students who accompanied him between Chapa, Mosimien, and Tatsienlu.
[6] Ibid. The biography records Bishop Giraudeau’s 1906 assignment and Hiong’s subsequent missionary work with Father Charrier in the Taofu region.
[7] Mission Thibet, “Histoire de la chrétienté de Yerkalo.” The account traces the Yerkalo community to Christians displaced from Bonga after its destruction in 1865 and dates the establishment of the Yerkalo mission to approximately 1867. Mission Thibet: Histoire de la chrétienté de Yerkalo.
[8] Ibid. The mission history records repeated expulsions and destruction of mission posts, as well as French diplomatic intervention on behalf of the missionaries.
[9] Ibid. The source states that during the anti-Christian violence of 1905, four Paris Foreign Missions Society priests and eleven Christians from Yerkalo were massacred “by emissaries of the lamas,” while the residence and chapel were burned.
[10] Mission Thibet, “P. Télesphore Hiong.” According to the biography, Hiong was detained, chained, and threatened with death during the revolutionary turmoil before being freed by Chinese troops. Mission Thibet: P. Télesphore Hiong.
[11] Ibid. The biography states that Hiong retired to Mosimien in 1930 and later to Tatsienlu, where he died on February 6, 1945, at age eighty-five.
